Lisa Zhu | Spreading a little good will

If you're a junior or senior currently scrambling for a job, you might as well pack up your bags right now and see what the economy looks like on Mars. But if you're an inmate in the Philadelphia Prison System scheduled for release in the next few months, you may actually be in luck.

Last week, Mayor Michael Nutter announced a new partnership with Goodwill Industries and the Knight Foundation that would provide up to 400 newly released ex-offenders with jobs. This arrangement could be a win-win situation for everyone involved. Under this program, Goodwill would operate "sheltered workshops" that temporarily hire former inmates to perform piecework labor while helping them develop the skills necessary to obtain more long-term forms of employment. As an added benefit, if the program works, it could save the City of Philadelphia several million dollars in the process.

Ex-offenders "are getting job coaching and job placement services," said Goodwill spokeswoman Juli Lundgren. "We work with them to see what their strengths and weaknesses are and help them decide where they can go."

Before indignant readers demand why jobs are going to former convicts instead of people with no criminal record (especially during the current economic crisis), consider the situation. First of all, the type of work that Goodwill's sheltered workshops perform does not take away any employment opportunities from the general population. "We're soliciting outsourced piecework labor from private companies," Lundgren said. "For instance, we have a partnership with Dell to help them recycle old computer parts." To clarify, piecework labor refers to wages paid literally by how many pieces the worker completes during his or her shift. The benefits of the program lie mainly with the accompanying rehabilitation curricula.

In other words, the opportunities available in these sheltered workshops present no cost to job seekers without criminal records, but would instead greatly improve public safety in Philadelphia and provide ex-offenders with a rare opportunity to turn their lives around.

Currently, "the recidivism rate [in the US] is extraordinarily high - two-thirds of all prisoners wind up getting sent back to prison within a relatively short time after being released," said Urban Studies and History professor Eric Schneider. "Prison itself doesn't reform anyone; if anything, it makes people worse."

Based on these findings, ex-offenders are the group most at risk for committing a crime in the future. Therefore, the mayor's decision to help this population segment successfully reenter society is one of the most promising strategies Philadelphia can undertake to reduce its crime rate.

The Goodwill program will "help [ex-offenders] start making a paycheck right away so they don't go back to their old ways," Lundgren said. "Far too often, people who have a criminal history return to crime because there's not that much they can do with themselves."

Although it is too soon to say whether Goodwill's rehabilitation program will actually reduce recidivism and crime rates, similar initiatives across the country have seen great success. For instance, San Diego recently implemented a Prisoner Reentry Employment Program (PREP) through the nonprofit agency Second Chance. Studies indicated that the recidivism rate amongst ex-offenders who participated in PREP was around 30 percent - less than half the rate of ex-prisoners who weren't in the program.

And perhaps most important considering the current City budget problems, Goodwill's program could save Philly taxpayers a bundle of money. "The cost of keeping someone in prison is about $40,000 per year nationwide," Schneider said. So basically, if Goodwill can achieve the same results as PREP - a 30-percent recidivism rate - with 400 ex-offenders, that could save the City of Philadelphia over $5 million a year in budget expenditures. And that's without factoring in the costs that were avoided by preventing these thefts, assaults or worse. That's quite a return on investment, considering that the Knight Foundation only committed $1.4 million over the next three years for this initiative.

Not only would these savings reduce Philadelphia's budget deficit and crime rate, Goodwill's program would provide a long-maligned group of people with a very rare opportunity to turn their lives around. In times of trouble, this is exactly the kind of uplifting, socially empowering (but still cost-effective) policy solution that the City should embrace.

Lisa Zhu is a College and Wharton senior from Cherry Hill, NJ. Zhu-ology appears on Thursdays. Her email address is zhu@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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